a lot of TERFs speak like they’re giving a speech in a movie. One time one of them referred to me & my “brethren”, which they then had to clarify meant trans people and their supporters. I still think about that and laugh sometimes. “you and your brethren” fedgyejgfjhdgsjhksa like what are we, viking warriors?
When white leftists make spurious notions about needing to unite under “class struggle” and not racism, it’s clear they don’t care about People of Color.
Just look at the way welfare and the minimum wage have been gutted and maligned. It’s ahistorical. There’s innumerable examples like these.
“In 1965 Dr. Geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country, in a brutally poor area in the Mississippi Delta. And so many of his patients came in presenting with malnutrition that be began prescribing food for them. And they would take these prescriptions to the local supermarket, which would fill them and then charge the pharmacy budget of the clinic. And when the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. – which was funding Geiger’s clinic – found out about this, they were furious. And they sent this bureaucrat down to tell Geiger that he was expected to use their dollars for medical care – to which Geiger famously and logically responded, “The last time I checked my textbooks, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.“”
Glad Republicans took the time to understand how health insurance works before they put together a health insurance bill that will impact millions of Americans.
Oh my fucking god.
I am a licensed insurance agent, let me tell y’all something.
There is a thing in our lives called RISK, okay. Risk exists because there is a chance of loss. If you have a car, you could crash the car. You would then have to pay to fix the car, pay for your injuries, pay for someone else’s injuries, pay for THEIR car, and also pay any fines and tickets you might have incurred thanks to the crash. Plus if they sue your ass for more money, you have to pay for a lawyer. That’s the RISK of having a car. How do you get rid of this risk? You don’t have a car. Having a car is what we call ‘exposure’ - the circumstance that opens you up to the risk of a loss.
Y’all with me so far about risk and exposure?
There are four key methods of managing risk. The first is Avoid. In this instance, you can Avoid the risk by not having a car. Of course, this method isn’t perfect because other people could still hit you, a pedestrian, with their cars.
You can Retain the risk. Basically, this means you own the car and you don’t have any insurance. Shit happens, you pay for it. A digression, but some states actually have laws in place for this - if you’re rich enough to conceivably pay all your own loss bills, you can prove it by putting up a $50,000 bond with the state insurance board, and then you are formally excused from having to buy insurance.
You can Reduce the risk. Buy a very safe car, follow all traffic laws, drive very seldom. You can minimize your risk this way, but you haven’t eliminated it, so there’s still the chance of a serious loss, especially because there are other people on the roads and some of them are careless and stupid.
So here we have three methods of managing risk. One only works for the super rich. The other two are far from foolproof. So what the hell are we supposed to do, so that a car accident, which happens every day, doesn’t cause such a catastrophic financial event that we’re in debt for the rest of our lives because we missed a stop sign?
That’s why insurance exists. Insurance is a manifestation of the final and most successful method of managing risk: TRANSFER.
When you transfer your risk, someone else agrees to share that risk of loss with you. You both help insulate one another against loss. When large communities pool their risk, the entire community has better financial stability and better protection against catastrophic loss. Yes, it means some people may pay for a service they never use, but they are part of the community too. What helps the community helps them, whether they recognize it or not.
For instance, let’s say that it wasn’t required to buy car insurance to drive (I’m aware that in at least one state it’s not, just bear with me please, and don’t all look at New Hampshire at once, it’s rude and they might shoot you). Buying car insurance is an absolute choice. Only those who actively choose to pool their risk do so. Think about how much they would have to pay if only a few people were members of the pool. Think about the rates we’d have to charge to ensure these people were covered in the event of a catastrophic loss.
When EVERYONE pays a little, EVERYONE pays less. That’s a fundamental aspect of risk transfer.
Now we’ve been talking about auto insurance, which is my wheelhouse. But let’s talk about Health Insurance.
Every single person here has a human body. BEING ALIVE exposes us to health risks, and there is no Avoiding it. Only the truly wealthy can afford to Retain that risk but thanks to the fuckery of various incarnations of our government, many of us are FORCED to, and as a result, if we suffer a catastrophic loss, we are helpless in the face of exactly the sort of life-destroying debt and retribution that insurance exists to insulate us from! Sure we can reduce the risk in a few ways, by trying to be healthier, but many conditions are hereditary and some people just plain don’t have that fucking option - they were born broken and they’ll always be broken and they are not served in any way by others telling them “JUST DRINK MORE WATER”.
The ONLY REASONABLE METHOD of managing health risk is widespread transfer. It’s creating a massive pool into which everybody pays a little, so the money is there when someone needs a lot. And if you don’t believe me, look at the other countries that are doing this successfully and waving it in our goddamn faces because fucking Americans can’t get our act together.
Now you have read a handy primer on what the fuck insurance is, why it’s necessary, and how it works. Please spread this like wildfire, because ignorance hurts everybody, kind of like how really fucking expensive opt-in health insurance hurts everybody except people who were already rich enough not to need it.
So… put in these words… (correct me if I’m wrong- I’m kind of making a mental leap and a lot of the insurance stuff was never actually explained to me.)
Insurance already works on a socialist model of co-operative payment. You pay your share, and if you don’t use your share it goes towards a possible emergency in the future OR someone else’s emergency. Which is why it’s important to have as many people in as possible- because it (in a perfect world) would lower the cost.
Am I understanding this right? That the phrase ‘socialized healthcare’ is kind of a redundancy?
Yes, you are understanding it right. The entire concept of insurance is based on socialized transfer of risk to remove the burden from individuals so that everyone can actually be covered.
That is LITERALLY the entire point.
If only one person is paying into the insurance pool, and that person has a $20,000 loss, then that person has to pay the $20,000, whether or not they can afford it. The insurance company, to make sure they have the money to indemnify (a word that means ‘restore to their condition prior to the loss’ or ‘make whole’) that person, has to collect $20,000 in premiums in order to pay out on that $20,000 loss.
If 20,000 people are paying into the insurance pool and someone has a $20,000 loss, then all those people only have to pay one dollar. The Insurance company would only have to collect $1 from those 20,000 people in order to cover that $20,000 loss.
The way insurance premiums work is the insurance company looks at loss information. Sometimes they purchase studies and reports from third parties who literally exist to do NOTHING ELSE but track certain kinds of loss. They figure out how much of that loss they will be financially responsible for in a given fiscal year, as well as their administrative costs, and they divide that number by the number of people paying premiums. That’s how you get your insurance premium. It’s literally called the Law of Large Numbers - we figure out how much we have to charge you by figuring out how much risk we’re taking on by studying thousands of people who are, in this case, driving cars and having accidents.
If, for example, in Tornado Valley the number of claims for hail damage have gone up thirty percent since last year, then we will have no choice but to charge 30 percent more for the coverage that pays for hail damage to your car. Car insurance costs have gone up recently because more people are texting while driving, so the number of accidents have gone up sharply. Car insurance costs have gone up recently because medical payments have increased in cost, and we also cover that. Car insurance costs have gone up because a bumper that used to cost $200 to fix now contains sensors and back-up cameras that cost $5000 to fix.
If we didn’t rate for that, you’d be on the hook for all those increased costs… not indirectly, by a relatively small increase in your premium, but DIRECTLY, to the tune of thousands of dollars.
There are arguments to be made about American healthcare and how it’s tantamount to price gouging. There are also arguments to be made about how if you’re extremely wealthy, you should contribute more to the insurance pool than people who are making very little money (which would occur anyway, we hope, because health insurance is contributed to through taxes, not through private companies charging premiums). But the fact remains that the very institution of insurance RELIES on huge pools of people paying in so that nobody is financially destroyed by a loss.
cashier: sorry for your wait. we’re short-staffed today
millennial: oh that’s ok no worries :)
baby boomer:
But listen that’s the thing.
We are short staffed almost 97% of the time at my retail job. Because corporate has figured out you can overwork 4 people at minimum wage instead of paying for the 8 people you should probably have to be on the clock.
Baby boomers grew up with stores that were adequately staffed, with workers who most likely had weeks of training for their jobs as opposed to the 1-2 shadow shift training we get now. Also those workers most likely were able to be full time if they wanted. Now retail, except for management positions, is mostly made up of part time workers, because you don’t have to give them benefits. So you have a workforce of perpetually underpaid, overwhelmed, undertrained people trying to do their best all while dealing with an entire generation of people who refuse to acknowledge that the system has changed and the average retail worker has NO control over that change and is being taken advantage of.
Like we got our customer surveys back, and almost every single one mentioned that they couldn’t find someone to help them or we needed more people on register because it was TOO SLOW, but what did management tell us instead of scheduling more people? We need to be quicker on register and call for backup if necessary. Which makes no sense because we can’t call for backup THAT ISN’T THERE.
Real human lives matter more than fictional characters. Even characters and stories that mean a lot to you. People matter more than fandoms. If you bully and harass people because of their ships or headcanons, you need to stop and reevaluate things
My boss’s first language isn’t English. However, she loves giving inspirational speeches to everyone. I think today she was trying to tell us “don’t just stand around looking pretty”, but what she actually said was “WE DONT HAVE TIME TO BE SEXY”.
“for five hundred years the essence of being black is that you can be transported. anywhere. anytime. anyhow. for five hundred years a black skin is a passport. to a lifetime of slavery. a guarantee that the european can carry out terrorist acts against the african with impunity. for five hundred years the european moves the african “all over the place.” at his behest and whim. and then one bright summer’s morning, he looks me in the eye and tells me: “you fucking people are all over the place.””
-
M. NourbeSe Philip, “Black W/Holes: A History Of Brief Time.” Fuse Magazine, 1998. (via jmjafrx)
i cant believe its daylight savings time and i havent seen the “hello its me your cousin oskaar from iceland” video on my dash yet you are all slackers
i guess i have to do all the work around here dont i
Simone Biles (b. 1997) is currently the most decorated American gymnast. She set a
national record at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, winning four gold medals, the
most a female gymnast has won in a single game.
She has a total of nineteen Olympic and World
Championship medals, fourteen of them gold. She has been the world all-around
champion on three consecutive years, and the US national all-around champion
four times, from 2013 to 2016.
Okay so here’s one of those rare gems of moments where retail is actually kind of okay.
I’m gonna start by revealing the well-kept secret that I live in Ohio… in case all the buckeye references flew by you. And Ohio… is obsessed with space travel. I mean- it makes sense. We’ve got a couple astronauts in our history, there’s the National Aeronautics and Space Museum in Dayton, and on those quiet summer nights, where the sky is clear and the stars are twinkling in the distance, it is hard to not look up at the darkness and wonder if there is intelligent life out there. (Not here.)
Anyhow, all the fourth graders have a big space-related project around this time of year and this means that we, as craft retailers, have to be problem solvers. The number one problem is ‘oh gods, please tell me that you’re going to put a primer down on that styrofoam before you spray paint it.’
Because- you guessed it- everyone is making a damn solar system model.
That is to say… their parents are making the solar system model.
I was just finishing up explaining the use of a styrofoam primer and which spray paints are safe to use with styro to the mother of one ten-year-old when the mother of another ten-year-old rounds the corner looking desperate.
“Is this a good paint for cardboard?”
It’s not. So I round her back to where her son and daughter are waiting and explain them what will work. She needs green, and there are three different kinds of greens. The mom holds them up and has her daughter choose.
“Which one do you want for your face?”
I freeze because putting acrylic on your skin is a great way to get a rash. “Hold on, you’re not putting this on your skin, are you?”
“No, gosh no. We’re painting a box and putting the box on her head.”
…
Okay, I’m curious. “Can you explain what you’re making?”
The daughter chimes in. “We have to do a project for school and I’m gonna dress up like a alien!”
Instantly, I love this child. Not just because she considers dressing up as an alien to be an acceptable school project, but because she’s not leaving it to her mom to do all the work.
So we talk for a minute about project stuff and she tells me that her brother is going to be the first man on Mars. Her brother is five. Her brother concurs- he is going to be the first man on Mars. Their mom tells me about the Neil Armstrong museum nearby. Like… this is a family of people excited about the future of space travel.
“Did you hear about those new planets,” I asked.
The little girl starts jumping up and down. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Mom: “Can you remember what they said about the new planets?”
“They said…. they said that they can… uhhh… sustain life! There might be aliens!”
Mom: “Now, they said they can sustain life, but I think they also said that it isn’t very advanced life.”
The little girl looks off into space- contemplating this new information. She is formulating a very important thought.
ok but what if like. werewolves transform under the full moon but theres just this one and by day hes a big tough guy and then when he transforms hes a tiny dog. just fucking. just fucking turns into the tiniest, fluffiest dog
Today, Donald Trump held a listening session on healthcare. As everyone has only just recently learned, healthcare is actually very complicated. Who knew? (No one.) And because President Trump was discussing such a complicated topic, he repeatedly placed his hand on and around his face in consternation. Here are some…
the water fountain at work has broken so the cafe is handing out free coffee all day and honestly i know this is a bad idea but i am going to abuse this so much and i am ready to face the consequences head on
ive had 17 coffees and i can’t feel my legs but on the plus side ive spoken to god and she seems chill
Google has a long history of introducing, then forgetting about, and finally officially killing off its products. Most recently, that included Google Spaces, a service that most of us never knew existed to begin with. Let’s take a tour of some of our favorite services Google’s killed off over the years.
“They bought it?” Lyman asked as Jon hung up the phone.
“I got the contract,” Jon confirmed, dazed. “I’m — I’m syndicated.”
“You did it, man!” Lyman said, clapping him on the back. Odie barked.
“They’re already thinking about merchandising deals,” Jon continued, staring into space.
“I told you things were going to turn around for you,” Lyman said with a nod. Odie continued barking, making it clear that he was not just trying to be supportive. “Hey, look, I’ve gotta take the dog for a walk. If the alarm goes off while I’m gone, can you take dinner out of the oven?”
“Yeah,” Jon said, with no real conception of what he was agreeing to. He still had not yet finished processing that phone call, the idea that he was going to be paid, consistently, that he was a working cartoonist, that his comics would be in papers. Merchandising deals. Merchandising.
It was not until he heard the door that Jon realized he was alone in the apartment.
Just him, and Garfield.
From the corner, it growled.
Jon’s heart spasmed; he hadn’t realized it was in the same room. “H—hey,” he said. It would have been a dumb thing to say if it was a normal cat. It was a dumber thing to say under the circumstances. Its eyes glowed red in the shadows. “How are you?” he asked, then winced as the cat growled again. “Heard the good news?” he asked weakly.
MY END OF THE CONTRACT HAS BEEN FULFILLED
It rumbled through his brain like an earthquake, words without words. He covered his ears even though it wouldn’t help. “Yeah, thanks for—”
I WILL FEED
Jon’s heart spasmed again, overwhelmed with the sense of a hunger not his own. “Right, about that—”
YOU WILL FEED ME it said, words written in blood, thick and hot.
“—yes, I got that, I’m just not really sure what I’m supposed to—”
MEAT and the word throbbed, tore.
“Would chicken be okay?”
UNACCEPTABLE it said in broken bone and jellied marrow.
“I don’t want to stereotype you by assuming you want to eat my roommate—”
YES GIVE ME HIS HEART it said, pulsing, torn flesh.
The glowing eyes moved from the shadows, grew larger, taller. Hellfire, if fire could cast dark instead of light, orange and red, fire and blood. The indistinct shape that might have been a cat became an indistinct shape that might have been a man, large, always large. Jon shrank back as it stretched to fill the room, tried not to look directly at it. Hot breath and sharp teeth against his skin, even though it couldn’t have been, because he was still wearing his jacket.
There was a chiming sound.
WHAT WAS THAT
“Uh.” Jon swallowed, hard. “Dinner?”
FOOD
“Yes,” Jon said, “but I don’t know if you can eat people food…”
Garfield sat in the middle of the floor, wide as it was tall. Its gaze was baleful.
“Right. You can eat whatever you want.” Slowly Jon inched around the cat to head toward the kitchen. “I don’t really know what it is, though. It might be… vegan.”
Garfield hissed, the sound of pain, and Jon fled toward the oven.
I SMELL MEAT
Jon stopped himself from telling the cat get off the counter. “I think it’s a casserole,” he said, removing the dish to set it on the stove. He gingerly removed the lid, his hands safely wrapped in oven mitts. “Oh. It’s lasagna.”
GIVE IT TO ME
“It has to cool,” Jon said. Garfield hissed again, and the sound turned Jon’s blood to fiberglass. He backed away, and the cat leapt bodily and entirely into the baked pasta. It did not seem bothered by the fact that the pasta sauce was still bubbling, and Jon tried not to look at the void of its mouth. A black hole rimmed with fangs, an absence of all light, drawing in all that it touched to disappear within.
WHAT IS THIS it asked, and a hellfire paw batted at a stretchy piece of mozzarella.
“… cheese?”
The cat-shaped thing nodded, still sitting in the dish of lasagna.
WE DO NOT HAVE THIS
“You don’t have cheese in hell?”
It nodded again.
“I guess that’s what makes it hell.” If Garfield appreciated this observation, it did not show it. It cracked open its maw again, more lasagna disappearing, and Jon looked away. “That lasagna was supposed to feed us for a week,” he sighed. “How much longer do I need to do this?” he asked.
UNTIL YOU ARE SATISFIED
“Until I’m satisfied?”
YOU MUST FEED ME TO SATISFY YOUR HUNGER
Realization dawned. “Wait, but — I thought this was a one-time thing.”
IT WAS NOT
“If you leave, I get fired?”
PERHAPS
“So I might still be able to make it on my own.”
DO YOU BELIEVE YOUR SKILL IS ENOUGH TO BRING YOU ALL THAT YOU DESIRE
Jon thought of the portfolio sitting in his room, and sagged. “… no.”
It grew, limbs stretching, claws turning to fingers and then claws again. It sat on the counter like a solid mirage, licking red from its hands.
YOU WILL HAVE RICHES BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS it said in truffle oil and fur and gold. SO LONG AS I AM FED YOU WILL NEVER KNOW HUNGER
Syndication and merchandising deals and maybe someday a cartoon on television. His signature in every newspaper in every house in the country. In the world, even. He raked his fingers through his curls and tried not to look at its claws.
“I guess I’m stuck with you, then,” Jon said.
It didn’t slide off the counter the way a man would, shifted off like drifting smoke or licking flames, stood and was no shorter. Tall and broad and solid, a weight to its presence as it moved closer. Jon shrank back again as it loomed, and this show of submission seemed to please it. Hot breath and sharp teeth against his skin again, and he shivered.
Me watching scary movies: Oh my god don't investigate the strange noise you heard are you stupid get out of the house!
Me at home: *hears noise* *turns on porch light* *yells at darkness* SOME OF US WORK IN THE MORNING SATAN KEEP IT DOWN
“While it was not our intention, we recognize that the example of a slave poster, although historically relevant, was culturally insensitive,”
Ya THINK?
Parents of students at South Mountain Elementary School were disturbed when they learned of an assignment recently completed by fifth graders: designing slave auction posters.
I just feel like if you write a straight character, you should have a really solid reason in the story for that character to be straight. Otherwise it just feels cheap like pandering yknow?
